This disclosure relates to routing and, more particularly, to routing network traffic based on a unique identifier.
Client/server applications are ubiquitous in today's networked computing environment. Users may access software and services provided by a server from virtually any networked client device. For example, a user of a web-based email service may access his or her email from a personal computer, a public computer, a work computer, a personal digital assistant (“PDA”), a cell phone, or any other device.
The server or servers that provide the email service typically may store and retain the user's data, including the user's email and account settings. If there are many users of the service, multiple servers may be needed to process all the requests from the users. Typically, when a user accesses the service, his or her request may be passed to one of the servers (or one group/cluster of servers) for processing.
The user request may take the form of network traffic. For example, when a user signs into his or her web-based email account, the web-based email account may generate network traffic that travels from the user's device to the server and vice versa. The network traffic may include user data, such as a username, password, and/or an authentication, for example. The network traffic may also include data specific to the application, such as email data or other data. As one skilled in the art will recognize, data specific to the application may be typically encapsulated in an application layer of the network traffic, such as OSI layer-7 data.
The network traffic sent by the client device typically may include a network destination address. The client device or client application may receive the network destination address, which may be the address of one of the servers, via a directory name search (“DNS”) service, for example, then insert the network destination address into the network traffic. The client may then send the network traffic out onto a network where the network traffic is eventually routed to the network traffic's destination.
Typically, the network destination address may be any one of the servers (or groups/clusters of servers) that process user requests. Since the user's network traffic may be received by any of the servers, the servers may have to synchronize the user's data. For example, each server may have to retain a copy of the user's data in case the server receives a request from the user to access the data. When the data changes, all the servers may have to synchronize the user's data so that the user does not access out-of-date data. This approach may be problematic because each server will have to maintain its own storage, and because constant synchronization between the servers may cause network contention. Alternatively, each server may have to access a centralized data store that retains a single copy of the data. This approach also may be problematic because it requires a central data store with significant processing power and network bandwidth. This approach may also cause network contention. Alternatively, a system may have multiple back-end data stores. This approach is also problematic because it requires synchronization between the back-end data stores so that the user does not access out-of-date data. The constant synchronization with this approach can also cause network contention and result in a user accessing out-of-date data.